Sports
High School Sports

Bears open senior boys football season with win

Max MacGilivray, left, of the St. Benedict Bears, is tackled by Nathaniel Goupil, of College Notre-Dame, during high school football action at James Jerome Sports Complex in Sudbury, Ont. on Friday September 15, 2017. John Lappa/Sudbury Star/Postmedia Network

Quarterback Adam Rocha got sacked on the first play of the 2017 SDSSAA senior boys football season.

He got back on his feet, dusted himself off, helped lead the St. Benedict Bears down the James Jerome Sports Complex field, and connected with teammate Dakota Coggins for a 38-yard touchdown pass.

“Sometimes, a quarterback will fold,” Bears head coach Junior Labrosse said. “There’s pressure, there’s a young O-line, but they picked it up.”

The Bears scored points on their first three drives of the game on Friday, on route to a commanding 44-0 win over the College Notre Dame Alouettes, in Week 1 action.

Joshua Wilcox hauled in three touchdowns, Rocha threw for three majors, Coggins received for six points and threw for six points, Erik Laframboise bullied his way to the end zone once, and Christopher Scherzinger neatly did the same.

“The offence was out there running on full steam,” Wilcox said.

After Coggins scored the first points of the season for the Bears, Laframboise bulldozed into the end zone on a 17-yard touchdown run.

The Bears led 15-0 after the first quarter, after securing one point off a missed field goal.

In the second quarter, Sam Sirkka intercepted a pass for the Bears, and Wilcox, on the ensuing drive, scored his first of three touchdowns, with a 25-yard catch.

A little more than two minutes later, Wilcox found himself back in the Alouettes’ end zone thanks to an 18-yard grab.

The Bears led 29-0 after the first half.

The Bears started the third quarter by clinching a safety, then Coggins, in as quarterback, met with Wilcox for an 11-yard catch and run, pushing the lead to 38-0.

In the fourth, Scherzinger closed out the game with a one-yard run.

Wilcox was pleased with his three-touchdown performance, but he more so was impressed with his blocks.

“I’ve been working on that a lot with the (Sudbury) Gladiators,” Wilcox said. “Being the youngest receiver in the corps (with the Glads), I didn’t get many passes, so I worked on my blocking. I had a nice big block on our first rushing touchdown. My blocking was really good, the catches were routine catches because the quarterbacks were making nice reads.”

The Bears are perceived by many in the football community to be a contender this season, and while the Alouettes are a regrouping program, they proved to be a tough out.

“You still have to play the game no matter the opponent and you can’t take them lightly,” Labrosse said.

Alouettes head coach Eric Breau was pleased with his charges’ outing.

“We did better than last year and that was the aim coming into this one,” Breau said. “We don’t expect to go from a team that went 0-5 to 5-0. We gotta build on that and we have quite a few players that returned from last year and that’s going to help us perform better this year. I think they did very well, especially for the first game of the season, and with some of those people having never played football before.”

While a 44-0 win is a quality start to the season, Labrosse expects more out of his players, especially with the defending champions, St. Charles College Cardinals, waiting for the Bears in a Week 2 matchup.

“There’s eight interceptions that the defence did not get,” Labrosse said. “Mistakes like that against bigger teams, which, you know, our opponent next week is St. Charles, you can’t let that happen. You gotta capitalize on every moment. There were a few miscues at the quarterback where … practice is different than games, the adrenaline is going, but as a performance, I’d say our defence played well, offence played well also, but there’s still a lot of work to do.”